The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

options. To be gutted, salted, and wrapped in bandages like Lorraine Edgerton? To be beheaded, your face and scalp peeled from your skull, your features shrunken to the size of a doll’s? Or to be steeped in the black water of a bog, your death agonies preserved for all time in the leathery mask of your face?
    Or did the killer have a special plan reserved for Josephine, some new technique that they hadn’t yet encountered?
    The conference room had fallen quiet, and as Jane looked around the table at the team of detectives, she saw grim expressions, everyone silently acknowledging the unsettling truth: that this victim’s time was quickly running out. Where Barry Frost usually sat, there was only an empty chair. Without him, the team felt incomplete, and she couldn’t help glancing at the door, hoping that he’d suddenly walk in and take his usual seat at the table.
    “Finding her may come down to one thing: how deeply we can get into the mind of her abductor,” said Zucker. “We need more information on Bradley Rose.”
    Jane nodded. “We’re tracking it down. Trying to find out where he’s worked, where he’s lived, who his friends are. Hell, if he has a pimple on his butt, we’d like to know about it.”
    “His parents would be the best source of information.”
    “We’ve had no luck with them. The mother’s too sick to talk to us. And as for the father, he’s been stonewalling.”
    “Even with a woman’s life in danger? He won’t cooperate?”
    “Kimball Rose isn’t your ordinary guy. To start off with, he’s as rich as Midas and he’s protected by an army of lawyers. The rules don’t apply to him. Or to his creep of a son.”
    “He needs to be pressed harder.”
    “Crowe and Tripp just got back from Texas,” said Jane. “I sent them out there thinking that a little macho intimidation might work.” She glanced at Crowe, who had the bulky shoulders of the college linebacker he’d once been. If anyone could pull off a macho act, it would have been Crowe.
    “We couldn’t even get close to him,” said Crowe. “We were stopped at the gate by some asshole attorney and five security guards. Never even got in the door. The Roses have circled the wagons around their son, and we’re not going to get a thing out of them.”
    “Well, what
do
we know about Bradley’s whereabouts?”
    Tripp said, “He’s managed to stay under the radar for quite some time. We can’t locate any recent credit card charges, and nothing’s been deposited in his Social Security account for years, so he hasn’t been employed. At least, not a legitimate job.”
    “In how long?” asked Zucker.
    “Thirteen years. Not that he needs to work when he’s got Daddy Warbucks as a father.”
    Zucker thought about this for a moment. “How do you know the man’s even alive?”
    “Because his parents told me they get letters and e-mails from him,” Jane said. “According to the father, Bradley’s been living abroad. Which may explain why we’re having so much trouble tracking his movements.”
    Zucker frowned. “Would any father go this far? Protecting and financially supporting a dangerously sociopathic son?”
    “I think he’s protecting
himself,
Dr. Zucker. His own name, his own reputation. He doesn’t want the world to know his son is a monster.”
    “I still find it hard to believe that any parent would go to such lengths for a child.”
    “You never know,” said Tripp. “Maybe he actually loves the creep.”
    “I think Kimball is protecting his wife as well,” said Jane. “He told me she has leukemia, and she did look seriously ill. She doesn’t seem to think her son is anything but a sweet little boy.”
    Zucker shook his head in disbelief. “This is a deeply pathological family.”
    I don’t have a fancy psychology degree, but I could’ve told you that.
    “The cash flow may be the key here,” said Zucker. “How is Kimball getting money to his son?”
    “Tracking that presents a problem,” said Tripp. “The family has multiple accounts, some of them offshore. And he has all those lawyers protecting him. Even with a friendly judge on our side, it will take us time to sort through it.”
    “We’re focused only on New England,” said Jane. “Whether there’ve been financial transactions in the Boston area.”
    “And friends? Contacts?”
    “We know that twenty-five years ago, Bradley worked at the Crispin Museum. Mrs. Willebrandt, one of the docents, recalls that he chose to